Becoming essential during Covid-19.
“Even though the facility had kept the virus out of the building so far, the pandemic was killing my dad.”
The first time I saw my father at his memory care facility, after ten weeks of Covid-19 lockdown, he sat at the breakfast table, slumped in his wheelchair. He wore only a hospital gown, hospital-issued socks with treads, and a blanket draped over his shoulders. When the blanket slipped away, gooseflesh rose on his bare arms. And his arms were marked with purple bruises.
He was only 72. He had just gone into hospice when the pandemic hit.
I hurried…
Jane survived Covid-19. Her roommate, Elida, did not.
“I‘m not going to start the blame game … except to blame the government for sabotaging the CDC and science.”
Editors’ Note: Violinist Jane Soyka lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Covid-19 spiked dramatically in November. Her story shows how quickly symptoms can go from mild to severe, how dire conditions are in emergency wards, and how confusing the spread can be.
Jane’s first symptoms manifested on November 6. She tested positive on the 10th, and her husband, David, was presumed positive as well. …
Dr. Leslie Hayes took every precaution, but she still caught COVID — her thoughts on contagion, masks, the vaccine, and the holidays.
“The virus had gone through 50 people before I got it. Many of them took precautions and then just got unlucky, but some of them were careless or didn’t think the rules applied to them …”
Leslie Hayes, M.D., treats patients in Española, New Mexico, a state experiencing one of the most severe crises from the late-November / early-December COVID-19 spike.
Just before Thanksgiving, Leslie caught COVID.
So, 2020 has not been kind to me. I broke my hip and then I got COVID. Unrelated but inconvenient.
So far, it has been a “mild” case, but mild COVID is still…
“… I don’t know if his hands are moving
but I bet they are somehow I’d feel
washed over like that too and be so
proud of us”
who we were when
.
Isn’t it a great country he asks me
as we cross the Panhandle
for the second time in three days
I suppose I answer but
why would you say that
right here right
.
This paved road he says
through these fields and
trucks carrying every imaginable
somewhere many trains you think
we passed in both directions between
these poles the government
look at them put up a long time ago
…
A young family takes a risk to return from abroad.
“In the last few years, when I’ve gone abroad it has become an increasingly bigger test of courage to state I’m from the U.S.”
Shortly before leaving England, I took my daughter to our favorite park to let her stomp about a pitted soccer field. It’s an old park surrounded on three sides by woods and on one side by a brick wall of a Victorian-era prison.
Another father was there with two kids: one a toddler the same age as my daughter, keen to push his own stroller; the other was in primary school, huddled over her phone. We…
A pandemic and other global breakdowns inspire a visual journal of diverse styles and influences.
“I think for me what is interesting about this series of work is the diversity of voices within myself.”
Editors’ Note: Alexandra (Ali) Blum is a California-based artist who draws on influences from around the world. When the quarantine was put in place, she started a series of paintings — which quickly became a series of mixed-media artworks — addressing the pandemic, politics, climate change, racism, protests, and other big topics of 2020.
On her website, Alexandra describes her goals as an artist: “I am interested in capturing the moment of seeing when something changes and the magic in the…
We give thanks for good work in a difficult time.
We at Broad Street are proud of everything we publish, and we wish we could nominate all of it for every award out there. Alas, we can choose only a handful. For Best of the Net, some nominees come from our Summer/Fall 2019 “Birth, School, Work, Death” issue, some from our 2020 Pandemonium Blog. All of them come from the heart. Why not give them a read or a re-read right now?
PROSE
“I Got Grown,” a memoir by Joe Milan, Jr.: A young man begins work where others’ lives end.
It’s as welcoming as a mother, but none of this was personal.
When a tsetse fly
-
chews your skin with its scissor teeth, through delicate capillaries for the sweet stain of red, it does so completely in earnest.
-
It ushers in the flagellate protozoan Trypanosoma brucei gambiense. Those misshapen parentheses swim — and they must swim — through passageways, the secrets of your body. The tsetse fly is long gone by the time your central nervous system starts to stutter.
-
A child catching her breath over the steep hill of a consonant.
-
What the doctors call sleeping sickness is to the tsetse fly nothing more than the squeal of a hawk catching…
Nobody wants to live with a corpse …
Screaming at the Brooklyn Bridge
After Robert Lowell’s “Waking in the Blue”
*
I weigh one hundred and five pounds
after my New York breakfast
of vanilla Soylent, all I can keep down these days, thanks
to the anti-depressant. I swallow it, beige smoothie,
every four to six hours.
SSRI? Every twenty-four.
*
My roommate asks if I will eat something.
No, a real something,
and I do.
Nobody wants to live with a corpse.
I want to show him — all of them —
strut around this city, skin melting off bones, screaming, “I am here!”
to the Brooklyn Bridge, all 14,680 tons of…
Going meds-free when the world is having a major depressive episode.
“Maybe depression is a normal response to a global pandemic. We don’t really have benchmarks for such an event. If I get down, what can I use to help me bounce back?”
I do not plan to cry.
I am lying on my back, watching my husband put on his pajamas. I have brushed my teeth and turned out my light.
“That was a good episode,” he says, pulling on his flannel PJ pants. “The scene when the brother and his wife…” He trails off, chuckling.
Oh god, I think. He is laughing about a scene on the show Zoey’s…
Broad Street Magazine
An interdisciplinary magazine of nonfiction narratives and artwork.
